Bold, Italics and Underlines: How to Use Them Effectively in Your Blog

Bold, Italics and Underlines I’m sure they are attractive. How to use them in blog posts? What are their uses? These are the exact things, which I’m going to share in this post.

Benefits of Bold, Italics, and Underlines

Most of you bloggers know that Bold, Italicizing and Underlining keywords have an SEO benefit. However, when done in excess, over optimization warning beeps. Is this the only advantage of these text formatting tags? Certainly not, here are some of the benefits of Bold, Italics and Underlines in blog posts.

Increase average read time
Most of the blog readers are speed-readers. They just skim through the blog post.
I can say– “Think text-formatting tags as speed-breakers”, without which readers quickly slip away from your blog.When you highlight a piece of content using text formatting tags, they slow down their reading speed and read in detail when they come across these speed-breakers.

Content will be more scannable. Readers will love it. Think of a post that doesn’t have any text formatting tags and is written like a story. And the reader is searching only for a bit of information from it. It surely freaks him out!
Most of the readers are typography lovers; they love to read blog posts with great typography.

Bold tags can act as a substitute for headings. Excessive use of heading tags hurts SEO.
There should be at least 100 words below every heading tags, which is not possible most of the times. In that case, usage of bold tags instead of the header tags help.

Bolding, Italicizing and Underlining keywords. This is one of the SEO techniques to make the blog post keyword optimized. When done on exact keywords, this may appear over-optimization in the eyes of Google. Try to highlight part of the main keyword or LSI keywords.

All formatting tags perfectly integrate with the blog's design. Formatting tags appear great in all sorts of blog designs.
It enhances the design and typography of your blog.

These are some of the benefits of Bold, Italics, and Underlines. In addition to these, it also makes the article attractive and visually appealing.

Where to use Bold, Italics, and Underlines

Bold or strong

Important sentences.

Highlighting keywords.

Important terms.

Bold is used to highlight the text and capture the readers’ attention.

Italics or emphasis

Below are some of the places or situations in which you have to use italic tags.

Used to highlight phrases or thoughts.

Used to highlight names of books, blogs, newspapers, etc.

Conversations, dialogues.

Imagination or story (One day I was walking… blah… blah…).

Highlighting keywords.

Italics are used in the conversational type of sentences, dialogues, and names.

They are also used to emphasize a word in a sentence. For example, "It is recommended not to drink coffee more than twice a day". While reading the sentence, readers may filter out the word 'not'. So it is italicized.

Underline

Underline! Many times it stands out as a link! Too hard to differentiate links and underlined texts, especially in unfamiliar blogs.

Final wordsAlthough all bold, italics, and underlines can be used for keyword highlighting, I prefer bold and italic. Underline tags in blog posts should be used sparingly, as it can be easily confused with links.

Among Bold, italics and underlines. Italics are used more often than bold, followed by underlines.

If used properly, these formatting tags reduce bounce rate, increase average visit duration. Most of the bloggers are confused between these text formatting tags.

If this blog post has helped you, do share.

DISCLOSURE

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning that if you click on one of the links and purchase an item, we may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). All opinions are our own and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.

16 thoughts on “Bold, Italics and Underlines: How to Use Them Effectively in Your Blog”

The importance of Bold, Italics and Underlines in improving SEO cannot be denied. They are helpful for increased engagement and scalability. Yes, applying these strategically in keywords, sentences and important terms is important!

I have shared this same comment in kingged.com where this post was shared and "kingged" for internet marketers.

Well, I admit how poor my knowledge about text formatting tags and its simple basics. I know I was using these text formats way back a couple of years when Friendster still exist to make my Social media page stand out and attractive.

I know these are important stuffs and the crux of the matter in blogging, that bold, italics etc.

There are proper uses of these, I know and I just do not know how to stand out exactly.
So thanks for sharing this with us!

I found this post shared on Kingged.com, the Internet marketing social bookmarking and networking site, and I "kingged" it and left this comment.

Great post i think we must bold our important words in the article and no care about SEO because we want our users to have good experience and we generally scan the web pages so it's great to bold important points not just only keywords

I did not use this tactic before. However, in the last post, I used bold, italic and coloured fonts to highlight my keywords and LSI keywords. I don't know if I have over utilised it but it was very appealing visually.

That is really attention-grabbing, You're an overly skilled blogger.
I have joined your feed and sit up for seeking more of your excellent post.
Additionally, I've shared your web site in my social networks

Hi, Just wanted to know if there is any way to highlight/ change the color of texts typed in any webpage editor/ composer. For example, as I am typing this here, is there any App/ software that can help me to change the font color or highlight the text just before posting?

About Akshay Hallur

Hi, I’m Akshay Hallur. The founder of this blog GoBloggingTips. I’m a professional full-time blogger, an internet marketer, and a trainer. I’m here to help bloggers like YOU to create an outstanding blog and earn money from it.